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Thursday, April 29, 2010

Kerry McCarthy: Where's the gratitude?

Earlier today Kerry McCarthy - Labour MP for Bristol East, lawyer and allegedly her party's expert on social media - tweeted her sampling of the postal votes she had seen opened.

Courtesy of another Lib Dem blogger, I have a screenshot of her tweet,which began "First PVs opened in east Bristol, our sample:" and ended "#gameON!"

But I am not posting it here, because I would be committing a criminal offence.

Always anxious to help, even when the person is in another party, I tweeted McCarthy a link to a post made on Ministry of Truth when Jonathan Isaby and the Daily Telegraph appeared to have done something similar during the Ealing Southall by-election in July 2007.

That post pointed out that breaking Schedule 6, Section 66A of the 2000 amendments to the Representation of the People Act 1983 by disclosing how people have voted before the polls close is punishable by anything up to six months in prison.

Lavengro: they don't count the votes but they open the envelopes and do some pre-sorting. It means, for example, that if postal vote fraud with fake signatures is going on then there's a chance for the police to catch it in the act rather than only discovering afterwards that there may be something to investigate.

Done properly the system works pretty well. But "properly" includes MPs and others obeying the law...

Jonathan: I did get a tweet back, though given it dodged the question not sure it's much better than not getting one.